


Time And Again

by DesertScribe



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Boromir Lives, Crossover, F/M, Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-27
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-12-17 12:31:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11851617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/pseuds/DesertScribe
Summary: The Pevensie Children are in their fourth year of ruling as kings and queens of Narnia the first time that they find the strange boy wandering the battlements of Cair Paravel.





	Time And Again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Maidenjedi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maidenjedi/gifts).



The Pevensie Children are in their fourth year of ruling as kings and queens of Narnia the first time that they find the strange boy wandering through Cair Paravel. It is high summer, and all the windows of the castle have been thrown open as wide as they can go (which is not very wide at all in the case of the arrow slits that served the lower few floors, but they were still better than nothing) to catch what little breeze there was so that the humid air might not seem quite so stifling. Even at night everyone's clothes stick to the sweat of their skin, and all Beasts who are not vital to the running of the castle have, with the monarchs' envious blessing, retreated to the forests and mountains and underground burrows to find relief from the heat.

Susan sees him first. She is sneaking back towards her rooms after a late night dip in the courtyard fountain, not at all ashamed of her soaking wet clothes or tangled hair, merely worried that the fountain is not big enough to hold all four of them at once should her siblings see her and get the idea to go for a swim of their own the following evening. She catches sight of movement out of the corner of her eye and looks up to see a boy who is most certainly neither Peter nor Edmund, edged by moonlight up on the battlements and looking like a ghost in what appears to be a long white nightshirt, and he seems to be staring at the castle as if he had never seen it before. She goes to meet him, but her path up the stairs takes him out of view for a moment, and in that brief time he vanishes.

After Susan has roused her siblings from bed (and, oh, yes, she is going to have to fight for space in the fountain's cool water tomorrow night now that they have seen the state she is in and realized the possibilities), they bring a Hound up to check the scent trail, which turns out to be a short straight line, as if he had been dropped from the sky at one end of it and then carried away at the other. All four monarchs agree that it is very mysterious and somewhat worrisome, but there is nothing they can do about it unless matters develop further.

Lucy sees him next. By now it is the beginning of autumn, and the nights are starting to cool though the days promise to remain warm for a little while longer. This time the boy, Boromir, son of Denethor, arrives soon after breakfast and stays long enough for proper introductions and more. He is roughly of an age with Peter and claims to be from somewhere near Gondor. Within an hour they are all fast friends. Within two hours the weapons masters are making him spar against Peter and Edmund so that the young kings can have experience fighting a human whose moves they do not already know by heart. Within four hours he is falling out of an apple tree that Lucy dares him to climb. He nearly lands in Susan's lap, laughing all the while, and offers her one of the perfectly ripe red apples clutched in each hand as recompense. Susan accepts the apple. She also steals a kiss, because the curve of his smile is a wonder to her that she finds herself suddenly unable to resist. By sunset, he is gone again.

They don't see Boromir again until early the next spring. He says he has only been gone for six days. The boys spar again, starting early because boys will be boys and none of them wanted to miss the opportunity should Boromir disappear again too soon. Boromir is shocked to discover that Peter, at that stage of life where he is growing like a weed, has had time to add an extra three inches to his height and reach since last they fought, but he gamely accepts the challenge and gives as good as he gets.

Susan sits back and enjoys the show. Usually she does not care for battles, either real or pretend, but the flex and pull of Boromir's muscles and the grace of his well-practiced movements fascinate her in ways that her brothers do not, though they appear to be of roughly equal skill. Lucy notices Susan's attention and makes teasing comments about it. However, when the boys call a halt to rest themselves and slake their thirst, it is Lucy who sidles up to Boromir and asks if he could demonstrate his proficiency in any weapons besides the sword, perhaps the bow and arrow. He laughs and says that it is his brother who has the greater love for the bow but for Lucy and Susan he will strive to do what he can to acquit himself with honor anyway.

Taught by Centaurs, Susan and Lucy both easily best him at archery, and then Lucy, devious queen that her tutors have taught her to be, suggests that Susan show Boromir how to correct his technique. Susan does not know exactly when her sister sneaks away, taking Peter and Edmund with her, but when she notices she makes a mental note to thank her later. Then Susan returns her attention to very carefully helping Boromir adjust his stance. He cannot demonstrate any greater skill with the bow by the end of the day, but neither of them would consider the time to have been wasted.

This time, Boromir remains in Narnia for three days. He shares meals with the Pevensies. He debates tactics and administration policies and makes salient points in both regards. He allows Susan to steal him away for herself whenever she can. He tells her of Gondor and how he wishes that someday she might see it. This time, he is the one who steals a kiss, if something given so willingly could ever be compared to theft. On the third day, they have abandoned a picnic lunch and are playing catch-me-if-you-can, because the lot of them are growing into men and women with each passing but they also all still have a toe in the waters of childhood. Boromir darts around a corner after Lucy, who is in the lead, and Susan follows close behind him, but as she turns the same corner she sees only Lucy and nowhere Boromir might have hidden. Peter and Edmund loudly lament the loss of their sparring partner, and Lucy says she will miss his lively conversation, but Susan feels Boromir's loss more deeply than she can articulate even within the privacy of her own mind.

They do not see him again until summer.

Boromir continues to wander in and out of Cair Paravel through the years, with neither he nor the kings and queens of Narnia having any say in when he might suddenly appear or just as suddenly disappear, only ever staying for at most a few days at time then disappearing for months or whole seasons or years at a time and claiming to have only been gone for days or weeks when he returns. One day, when Susan and a newly returned Boromir have stolen away to one of their favorite secluded corners of the royal orchards, and after their initial passionate greeting, Susan takes the opportunity to truly look at him in a assessing manner for once, instead of simply drinking in all the details that she had too long been denied seeing as she usually did on the rare occasions of his visits. To her surprise, she realizes that even Lucy has passed him in age and must have done so some time ago. As much as she would like to make him hers forever, the span of years between them will only ever continue to increase unless Alsan allows him to stay, which does not seem likely, and she sees in Boromir's eyes that he must have been thinking the same thing for a while now.

There in that orchard, they reach a reluctant agreement: from then on there must be no more private moments such as they have been enjoying. There are no promises or vows to break, for they have never made any in that regard. They do not stop loving each other, but from then on they only allow themselves to behave as friends to each other just as Boromir is friends to Lucy, and Edmund, and Peter. The two weeks that follow are bittersweet for the both of them, because their new adherence to propriety does nothing to stop their longing, and then Boromir is gone again.

A month later, Susan announces her willingness to entertain suitors from other lands. She tells Boromir as much when next she sees him, half hoping that he will raise an objection. He does not, but she can see can see that holding his tongue pains him. Two years later, she meets Radabash, is courted by Radabash, escapes from Radabash. Boromir is not there for any of it, and the deeper that Susan gets into the final debacle of that relationship, the more she wishes that he were.

Life in Narnia goes on, and Boromir continues his involuntary comings and goings. He and the Pevensies grow further and further apart in age until Susan has aged more than twenty years and Boromir has only aged a few, though he has become a fine young man old enough to serve as an officer in his father's army. One day, Susan steals a kiss from him, for the first time since that day in the orchard. She feels like she is robbing the cradle but cannot bring herself to wholly regret it. The next morning, he has vanished again, and not long after that the Pevensies leave to hunt the white deer, never to be seen again in Narnia for another thousand years.

And then Susan and her siblings are all young once more, forced to fight their way through the awkward process of growing up all over again. The tide of the war turns and the children who once were not children are allowed to return to London. Their parents fawn over how much they've grown and how mature they've become, never knowing the half of it. For a year, life goes on.

The children's return to Narnia is so brief that Susan does not even have time for a private moment to ask Aslan of Boromir's fate before she is being told that she must once again leave this land she loves and never return. She knows the young man she had loved must be dead, though, because a thousand years is so very long, even to someone who had been skipping ahead months at a time as Boromir had, and now Narnia is dead to her too. She puts it all behind her and pretends that it was nothing but a dream, a game of make-believe, because to dwell on what she had lost would hurt too much.

Eventually, the war ends. Life in England goes on, until one day, for the rest of Susan's family, it does not, and Susan is left to finish her growing up all alone this time. She does her best to make do with what she has. She tries several different jobs before landing a position as a secretary at a small company. She does not love it, but it pays her bills. Within a year of taking the job, she has developed a reputation as the person who knows which strings to pull in order to get anything done, and there are joking whispers in middle-management, calling her 'the power behind the throne,' but she does not dignify them with a response. In her free time, she steals a lot of kisses from many people, and some try to steal her heart in return, but no one ever quite succeeds. She does her best to ignore the aching knowledge that once she had something, and someone, better.

One day, after she has reached her thirties for the second time in her life, Susan wanders into a secondhand shop while looking for a way to pass the time on a dreary Saturday afternoon. There, in the glass display case next to the cash register, she finds a little crystal bottle on a necklace chain that reminds her of the one that Lucy had had all those years ago. It's empty, of course, but she buys it anyway. She also buys a pair of knitting needles, because her mother used to knit and Susan is suddenly overwhelmed by the need to find a sense of connection to her past.

A week later, while trying to knit (Susan's mother had never gotten around to teaching her, and she is not having much luck learning on her own, even with the help of two books and the friendly old woman, Mrs. Smith-Houghton, who lives in the next flat over), Susan drops her ball of yarn for the fifth time in an hour, and this time it goes bouncing all the way across the floor and through the door into the next room, unraveling all the way. She jumps up and chases after it, but when she catches up and her hand closes around what remains of the ball, it passes through her fingers like a ghost and vanishes, leaving her grasping a handful of dry leaves instead. There is no sensible reason why there should be dry leaves in Susan's tiny kitchen, but when Susan straightens up she sees that she is no longer in her kitchen but in a forest instead, and without the yarn there is not even anything to indicate the path that she might have followed to get there.

Even amid a rising sense of panic, Susan does the sensible thing and takes stock of her situation, because as always if she is not sensible then no one else will do it for her. Her clothes have been exchanged without her notice, light summer cotton, pretty heeled shoes, and stockings being replaced by linen and wool garments, boots and light armor of sturdy leather, and a cloak of some shimmery grey material she cannot identify. There is a long hunting knife strapped at her hip and the familiar weight of a quiver of arrows on her back, and the knitting needles clutched in her hand have been replaced by a bow with craftsmanship the like of which she has never seen before. Wherever she is, it smells more like Narnia than England.

Susan does not know whether she should laugh or cry, but before she has time to do either, she hears the loud blasting of a horn. It is not the bugle calls of military maneuvers or the musical flourish of hunters running down fleeing game. It is a simple and desperate call for help, and Susan does not have to think twice before running to render aid. She does not need to follow the sound far before she finds a man defending what appear to be children from large, roughly man-shaped monsters. The "children" are taken, and the man is gravely wounded with an arrow in the shoulder, but Susan helps keep it from being worse.

It is only after others have arrived to fight, and the battle is done that Susan has time to take a proper look and recognize exactly who she has been defending. It is Boromir. Susan is shocked that this time he seems older than she is, for the first time since they met, though with having lived part of her life twice she suspects that they are now more or less of equivalent ages.

Introductions are made to the rest of Boromir's group, and an argument soon follows over who should stay behind to tend to his wounds while the others try to rescue the hobbits, for there is no way Boromir could keep up in his current condition and both Aragorn and Legolas can only do so much to aid him, even with their healing knowledge. Then Susan notices the chain still around her neck, the one item she has been allowed to bring with her from her old life. She knows it is empty, but she opens it and looks inside anyway, because there is nothing else she can do. Inside, she finds that Lucy's bottle (because, really, it must be one and the same) miraculously has one drop of healing cordial where previously it had had none.

There is no question of saving it for a more dire time than now. With Boromir's wound healed, the five of them can hunt orcs and get Merry and Pippin back. They question if she can keep up, but she tells them that when she was queen of Narnia she ran with Bacchus's Maenads for a week and a day without sleeping in celebration of every harvest time. Let them try to stop her it they dared.

For a long time, Boromir had thought his time in Narnia had been only dreams. Maybe it was true dreaming. Susan says she has spent a long time thinking Narnia was a dream too. Boromir asks about Aslan. Susan says she hasn't seen Him in a very long time. Boromir is surprised because he thought he saw Him walking behind her when she first arrived along with someone else he could not quite make out. Susan doesn't know what to say to that and tries to distract him with a kiss. Then she laughs, because the last time she had felt like she was robbing the cradle and this time she feels like she has just cheated death and robbed Boromir's grave of its prize.

Hand in hand, Susan and Boromir run toward their comrades who are already dwindling in the distance, their missing hobbits, and whatever future awaits the two of them.

Maybe this time she'll get to keep him.

**The End**


End file.
